Reignited my faith in the summer blockbuster

Rating: 9/10 (15 July 2013)

Ten minutes into Pacific Rim I turned to my sister sitting next to me and said "This is f***** good" I can't remember the last time I did that. Maybe as a 15 year old teenager when watching Independence Day? I'm now 30 so for this film to achieve that suggests either I'm not as cynical as I thought, or Pacific Rim is just bloody good.
I went into this film with pretty low expectations. My friend who loves Japanese anime was all over this movie and has been raving about it for ages. Big robots fighting big monsters though - didn't sell it for me. I used to like the original Godzilla years ago but the 90s remake killed that for me.
Pacific Rim has reignited my faith in Hollywood to deliver great summer blockbusters. I had faith in Guillermo del Toro and that faith paid off. (Not to mention everyone else who was involved in the film - sometimes we forget that a movie isn't made by a director alone)
I love big budget Hollywood action movies. But they have to be fun. Independence Day reigns supreme in my view for that reason. The Mummy isn't far behind. I can get on-board with all the cheesiness, bad one liners and plot holes if the film doesn't take itself too seriously, is a great spectacle and is just fun to watch. Tick tick tick, Pacific Rim delivers.
Enough navel gazing why is Pacific Rim so good?
First the visual editing. That $180 million budget? Del Toro uses slow cuts and low edits so you can actually see where it all went! Michael Bay take note. Some scenes almost feel like they're in slow mo, which is great. You get to see every detail of the carnage as it happens.
The music is also great. Before I saw Pacific Rim I noted Game of Thrones guru Ramin Djawadi did the score. You can definitely tell. By the time the climax of Pacific Rim is reached I was feeling shivers every time the score started it's riff.
The visuals and sound are important but at the end of the day even the biggest summer blockbuster needs a decent storyline and good characters. Unfortunately the human element is all too often lost in a visual FX heavy movie. But del Toro may have finally shown how to strike the balance. He does this by borrowing from the mech-human theme in Avatar but more effectively, because here the humans are inside the massive robots rather than being controlled like in a video game. When the monsters rip open the robots in Pacific Rim, the humans are painfully and sometimes fatally exposed. This is effective. I never felt the robots were invulnerable, in fact they felt surprisingly fragile especially by the climax of the film.
In films like this there is never going to be time for character heavy development but Pacific Rim does better than most. When robots died I felt gutted for the pilots, particularly the Russians at the end (is there an action movie that had ever existed that doesn't feature at least one Russian stereotype?)
The storyline isn't especially amazing but it's well executed. Films like this we all really know what's going to happen, it's how it happens that's riveting - execution becomes key. Del Toro doesn't fail to deliver.
Effective performances for a largely unknown cast - thank god they didn't cast Tom Cruise for the main character - that would've been an epic fail. Especially strong is Idris Ilba who channels The Wire's Stringer Bell like a laser in one particularly good scene.
Over the last 10 years with increasing ticket prices and poorly implemented 3-d I've often walked out of a movie theatre feeling ripped off. Walking out of Pacific Rim I felt like I'd got my money's worth. It reminded me why I enjoy summer blockbusters too - they're a helluva lot of fun.